Here’s the third startup in a run down of startups that I saw at the Nordic Venture Forum last week in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark. All the startups present at the forum were seeking either financing from the investors or partners for their business.

M-Brain (FI) - M-Brain is a value-added business intelligence firm operating in the media environment.

M-Brain focuses on media monitoring by delivering filtered, summarized and translated content from the Internet, both editorial and social media. They offer specific aggregated reports from more than 60 countries in 25 languages.

The company claims that it’s success factor is its ‘unique symbiotic combination of technology and human capital’. This stems at least partly from an in-house tech development that is funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. Also, members of the R&D team continue to work part-time in the academic EU research projects bringing a wide range of knowledge to the table. M-Brain is also involved in many other EU project which are likely to bring in again new research, and many times also added funding from EU’s budget. Along with a few private individual the company has investments from Veraventure.

M-Brain employs 56 in-house trained staff of which 34 work part-time. M-Brain differentiates itself from its competitors by a ‘business model that is based both on human expertise and state-of-the-art search technology’, where most of their competitors emphasize only one of the two.

The company does not say much about the search technology except that the quality ‘results from scalability of human effort, achieved by replacing the mechanical part by technological means, themselves scalable. Query enrichment tools and interactive means of reorganizing the filtered material transform raw data into normalized information. The process and the representation are optimized with regard to human cognition and customer needs, enabling also broader survey of discourses related to an industry domain, resulting in products such as alerts, ananlyses and recognition of emergent relationships and trends‘ . The only bit I could find out the above I can really say I understood was that the company also employs refined data stream offered by Whitevector and Leiki’s semantic filtering tools. That said, the company states that their R&D investments add up to 15% of turnover, which is a very healthy number.

How M-Brain aims to differ from the Google and other aggregators is by rewriting the content instead of only cutting and pasting or taking a bit of the article and pushing it forward in a feed. In the Nordics M-Brain needs to compete with the likes of Meltwater and Cision, but as soon as you enter for example the UK you can find bigger players such as Libraryhouse among others.

M-Brain might have a killer technology and I hope they do, since their editorial does not seem to offer terribly much value based on their blog (in Finnish) where they claim to ‘observe the social media and offer perspective, opinions and experiences from the web’. The quality of the analysis throws a dark shadow of their claimed ‘human expertise’ which accounts for half of their product offering. For pure information aggregation this might not pose such a problem, but for those looking for in depth analysis I’d look long and hard how much bang I get for my buck.

Currently the company is looking for acquisitions from the old media that work in the media monitoring industry. This would allow M-Brain to integrate their technology to these players’ organizations which are stuck in the old way of doing things, and thus pushing the efficiency and margins way up. This would also offer the company a way acquire new customers in a quick and efficient manner.

I received a tip from an unnamed source last night that Venture Cup Finland is rumoured to have partnered with Tekes to enable a one million euro grand prize for the winner. The grand prize will be given in the form of the Young Innovative Companies -fund.

Venture Cup is a business plan competition where the best business plans will be awarded. The deadline for the Idea Phase is 19th of November. See Venture Cup website for more details.

There has been some debate on whether anyone has ever actually received the young innovative company -Tekes support. This prize would thus actually conclude that debate and give the winner an excellent possibility to develop their business.

Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, offers Finnish companies possibility to take part in the UCLA Global Access Program once again this year. In the program MBA students of UCLA will make an international business plan for the companies as their final thesis, focusing on analysis and action plan for entering specific international markets. The program was ranked last year as the best of its kind in the US, and the bar for both participating companies and students is high. There have been yearly around 10 Finnish companies participating in GAP, including e.g. one of the fastest grown firms Openbit and Cidercone.

Eurostars is an European funding and support program specifically dedicated to creating competitive SMEs that will be leaders in their own sector. The program tries to ignite international collaborative research and innovation projects by easing access to support and funding for growth companies. The program is initiated by EUREKA, pan-European intergovernmental network founded to enhance competitiveness of European businesses. Eurostars offers 400 million euros of R&D funding to SME companies over a six year period. Tekes funds the Finnish participants with 5M euros per year. The next deadline for electronic submission of applications is November 21st 2008. See instructions from Tekes.

Gaming and interactive media companies can also apply for funding of 10,000-100,000 euros for producing product demos and prototypes in the Media 2007 program. The program is aimed at companies developing on and off-line interactive works. Eligible are interactive works for the computer, internet, mobile phone, games console (including handheld), and digital television, that present a substantial degree interactivity, narrative, and innovation. Companies that submit an application must have completed a previous interactive work, or an animation of at least 24 minutes, and prove that the work has been commercially distributed between January 1st 2006 and the date of submission of their application. The next deadline for applying is November 17th.

Megapolis, a Finnish born festival for global urbanites, is planning to go international. The theme of the third Megapolis is Happy Cities and according to Roope Mokka from Demos Helsinki says the event is going to be bigger and better than it was last year and that international expansion might be in the cards:

Theres plans, but theyre still v. much plans.

You can see the whole discussion thread here at Jaiku.

Once we get a samekind of buzz and self confidence going country wide and everybody buys the mindset that we can make it anywhere and everywhere, we’re doing just fine even without the ill incentiviced governmental early-stage investing and other market distorting subsidies from the public sector agencies.

As you probably know from our earlier posts the IVA conference was held last week in Tel Aviv, Israel. Now it’s time for a recap. I had an opportunity to interview Jussi Harvela, Pekka Roine and Kristian Järnefelt from Concilio Networks who all participated in the event. They all agreed that the whole trip was a success.

The Finnish delegation of fifteen people attended the conference (with total of 1700 attendees) itself and the companies also pitched for a selected VC audience just after the conference. Furthermore, all eight companies had private meetings with potential investors and partners. The advice from the experts (check the video) was clearly followed by the companies as the quality of pitches was described as “very good” or “excellent”. The Finnish companies were pretty unknown for Israeli VCs who were anyhow impressed by the absence of “me-too” startups among the pitchers.

Mr. Järnefelt also provided some personal insights on Israeli business as well. He said that Israel resembles Silicon Valley a great deal and many of leading US VCs are also present in Israel. There are quite a lot early stage capital available and a bubbling startup scene as well. One notable thing is the amount of serial entrepreneurs who yet are rare (at least in software business) in Finland. According to Mr. Järnefelt Israeli startups have a strong level of ambition in general and the incubators (that acccept only 3-5% of applicants) encourage such behavior. However, one thing the Israeli ICT segment yet lacks is “a Nokia”, so that gives the Finns something to chat about.

One the trip’s goals was to deepen the co-operation between Finland and Israel. Thus, representatives from Finnish Ministry of Employment and the Economy, TEKES, Finnvera and Technopolis Ventures got a first-hand look on, for example, the Israeli VC industry and the incubator system. After the Finnish delegation returns we hope the co-operation gradually deepens and gains momentum. The signs seem promising in any case.

There were discussions that an Israeli delegation consisting of VCs and government officials would visit Finland sometime during the Autumn. It would be great if Estonian and Russian startups could attend such an event along with Finnish companies. We will keep you posted if and when we hear more of this kind of plans.

In conclusion, an excellent event and we hope to see a more deeper interaction between Israel and Finland in the future.